The
Roberts Space Industries website reflects the continuing flurry of activity
surrounding Star Citizen, the upcoming space combat game that looks to
return to the glory days of games like Wing Commander and Privateer. The game's
crowdfunding campaign is hurtling along, and has surpassed the $22 million mark,
triggering the new stretch goals of a Facial Capture System and a Public
Transportation System. They add: "In addition to this immersion-enhancing design
upgrade, we’re also going to dedicate some of the additional funding to making
next year’s CitizenCon a bigger event! Thank you for making this all possible.
Keep spreading the word!" Here's the summary of the latest happenings, which
includes the release of a patch for the game's
hangar module and the commercial for the
2944 Aurora:

Two pieces of great news: after a long night of hard
work, the promised Hangar patch is available! You can check out the Avenger, the
privateer outfit, the Aurora LN, the fish tank… and a few other surprises. The
second piece of news is that in just four days, we’ve hit $22 million in crowd
funding! Between the hangar patch, the
bomber reveals, the
Aurora LN, CIG Manchester and the start of
The Next Great Starship, this has been a big anniversary week… and the best
is yet to come!

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Yeah. So right up until Freelancer he was kicking ass with amazing games that defined the genre. One project with problems and "OMG WHAT A CLUSTERFUCK!" Besides, MS bought up Digital Anvil right when all these "problems" were happening. That's when he became a "consultant." Big paycheck doesn't seem like that much of a clusterfuck to me. Despite all that, it came out just fine and people remember it quite fondly even after they removed some of the really ambitious features to push it out quickly.

I think the scope of Star Citizen is just about right. All "new" features are down to simple cosmetic things. Even the last big stretch goal was technology to put real peoples' faces on characters/npcs instead of promising some potentially out of reach game feature. It would seem to me they are pretty clear and focused on the base game now. $22+ million is a LOT of money, especially if you don't have to pay anyone except your dev team and rent an office. 50 developers, which is a lot, at $100K a year (lets say including insurance, 401K etc.) you will lay out $5 million, so $10 million for a 2 year dev cycle to release. The other $12+ million you have on hand is quite a lot of padding without counting how much you rake in after you release, assuming its even modestly successful. Especially if you are making interest on it. There are no investors to pay off with money. You're paying them off by making a game they want to play.

In any case, time will tell. I'm sure it will be be impossible to meet some of the crazy expectations that always revolve around these sorts of things, but the fact that they have multiple development teams working on separate modular pieces seems to be built in insurance. Assuming they get the space combat stuff out and its fun, everything else is just a piece they can refine and add as it's ready. That model already works (see Eve Online.) To be honest, in general, I am just as skeptical as you are, but in this case I don't see anything really that unreasonable.

I also have to admit, although its relatively simple stuff, imo the hangar is pretty impressive. Especially if you have some of the larger ships in it. It definitely makes you want to see these things flying in space and if they keep paying attention to player/backer input like they have, I think it has the potential to be one of those games you just have to play "for one more hour."

Sorry to be the lone optimist in this thread.

Integrating FPS into a space sim game is mostly cosmetic?

Again, I really hope I'm wrong, but we sunk 22 million into an idea and a reputation. We *still* don't have any concrete, tangible gameplay to base any of the hype on (ie: what exactly are you buying with your 500 dollar spaceship?) beyond a single room with a single model in it we could run around in, that took months to debug fully.